hendrik

I think it’s a waste of time. It doesn’t really add anything. If you don’t want to lose your subscription in the unlikely event that your server/instance goes down forever, just use the export feature to make occasional backups. You can always create a new account after something happened. No need to invest that time otherwise.

You’re free to use sockpuppets though. Or if you’re moderating stuff or participate in instances/communities who don’t federate.

Well, it’s a mass-produced, embedded device, designed to do one specific task. I guess lots of the video related stuff is assisted by hardware and they usually strip down the embedded Linux to the minimum needed. Because every Megabyte of storage costs extra and they need to hit some 99,- or 89,- price point. Furthermore, they don’t want it to boot for 20 seconds, so these devices generally don’t contain any extras. Similar things happen on wifi routers, the ones below $100 usually contain similar amounts of memory (or less). At least the last time I bought one.

Google the product name and Linux. If nothing turns up, you need to find the name of the SoC / processor and google that. Find out if it’s supported by Linux and what other people did to install Linux. You might need additional hardware though, like a serial or JTAG adapter and a soldering iron. Plus the required expertise. And I must warn you, that thing has 1 GB of RAM and 256MB(!) of flash storage. You won’t be able to do much with those specs. Like a slow FTP server or one small website or a few other tiny services which don’t use a lot of resources.

Sure, go ahead. Technically it’s not 100% correct. I mean lemm.ee wouldn’t be your provider, it’d be the people operating the server who provide the service to you… But I think it’s close enough. Only issue I can see is the term “provider” usually being used with commercial services. Like a cellphone provider or ISP. So I’m not sure if people start to think this costs $10 a month or something and is run by for-profit businesses… But we also use the word “provider” for free things, so I’m not entirely sure about that. But generally speaking I think we use different terminology because we don’t think of the Fediverse as a product.

I think Baikal or Radicale would be the usual contenders for that

I often recommend Mistral-Nemo-Instruct. I think that one strikes a good balance. But be careful with it, it’s not censored. So given the right prompt, it might yell at people, talk about reproductive organs etc. All in all it’s a job that takes some effort. You need a good model, come up with a good prompt. Maybe also give it a persona. And the entire framework to feed in the content, make decisions what to respond to. And if you want to do it right, and additional framework for safety and monitoring. I think that’s the usual things for an AI bot.

If you manage to do it, maybe write some blog post about the details and what you did. I think other people might be interested.

Is memory that small, connected externally, or does that SoC just end up being a large package, with that much RAM on it?

What kind of models are you planning to use? Some of the LLMs you run yourself? Or the usual ChatGPT/Grok/Claude?

It is like I said. People on platforms like Reddit complain a lot about bots. This platform on the other hand is kind of supposed to be the better version of that. Hence not about the same negative dynamics. And I can still tell ChatGPT’s uniquie style and a human apart. And once you go into detail, you’ll notice the quirks or the intelligence of your conversational partner. So yeah, some people use ChatGPT without disclosing it. You’ll stumble across that when reading AI generated article summaries and so on. You’re definitely not the first person with that idea.

I really don’t think this place is about bot warfare. Usually our system works well. I’ve met one person who used ChatGPT as a form of experiment on us, and I talked a bit to them. Most people come here to talk or share the daily news or argue politics. With the regular Linux question in between. It’s mostly genuine. Occasionally I have to remind someone to tick the correct boxes, mostly for nsfw, because the bot owners generally behave and set this correctly, on their own. And I mean for people who like bot content, we already have X, Reddit and Facebook… I think that would be a good place for this, since they already have a goot amount of synthetic content.

I think there is quite some overlap with Lemmy. You can do images and threads here. And they even show up in a tree-like structure. I’m not sure about ephermal, I don’t think Lemmy is as advanced. But other Fedi software have ephemeral posts.

So, given your requirements, I’d say this is that place. Communities would be your topic boards, and posts would be the threads. And user accounts and moderation would be the improvements to make it less toxic.

Lemmy and Fediverse software have a box to tick in the profile settings. That shows an account is a bot. And other people can then choose to filter them out or read the stuff. Usually we try to cooperate. Open warfare between bots and counter-bots isn’t really a thing. We do this for spam and ban-evasion, though.

SATA is more reliable than USB. And SSDs are faster, but more expensive than a harddrive. In the end all of this is possible. You need to see how much space you need and what you can afford. Unless you need it to be quiet/silent or super fast, a regular harddrive might do.

And with machine code, you got to keep track of what’s in the stack, CPU registers, … to make a sense of what the code and the next branch command does. It’s completely unalike processing human language. LLMs aren’t really set up to do it.

I think as written, I’d say these words are more FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)

And I’ve been running servers for quite some time as well. SearXNG seems rock solid. And it’s tested. And when I had security issues in general, it was because we didn’t do timely updates. I haven’t really ever been affected by zero days in my hobby linux endeavours. Okay, we had a few nasty things in some more fundamental building blocks and sometimes people using slower distributions had been fine… But I don’t think it applies here. With these kinds of things, the latest stable release is your best bet. Not a previous version with bugs in it, which have been fixed since. And especially not an unmaintained project.

They’re likely referring to the sentences outlining the differences between searx and SearXNG in searX README (archived Github repo). I think it was about some feature to report bugs to the project. And NG having a faster pace of development.

Right. They need education to make judgements. They need independent and neutral media to stay informed about the facts. They need a minimum amount of intelligence in order not to fall prey to populists and the next pied piper / con man who has some “simple truths” for them. And they need the time to occupy themselves with the details, i.e. not an 70h workweek to make ends meet.

It’s difficult. A large amount of people don’t even vote once every few years, so they won’t be involved in the first place. More people don’t have time to get into the details. And I mean how would you even know what do do in details about the economy, impact of laws and complicated consequences? Which decisions about the infrastructure like the electricity grid are neccessary now to yield the proper result in 5-10 years time? Do you even have the time and motivation to study all of this? And the masses can be influenced easily. We can see that even with the Swiss. So it’s questionable whether it even yields better results than the indirect approach. It’s certainly more democratic. But not necessarily better even if done properly.

I’d say if it’s as power hungry as people say, it’d maybe make a good on-demand backup solution. Install some NAS distribution and power it on once a month, make backups of your *arred collection and your laptop/workstation and shut it off again.

Had that happen to me without using Grayjay.